I was thinking about the importance that we (especially men) place on having at purpose and adventure in living. It reminded me of a book I read a few years ago. The title of the book is The Call by Os Guinness. The author works to develop a biblical view of calling. Guinness says “calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.”
There are a number of unsatisfactory philosophies in vogue in regard to spiritual searching and calling. One is to view the search as its own reward. You can just relax and chant “better to travel hopefully than to arrive.” Open minds can be empty heads. How can you travel hopefully if there is no destination? Secondly, you can define desire as bad. Guinness points out that this South Asian view leads to the conclusion that desire is not a good thing that can go wrong but is essentially bad. Thirdly, you can seek a human love on this earth as the most and highest good (Think Chick Flick, think the movie Titanic).
Fourth, in Guinness’ list, you can seek God’s love (agape). He says that:
The way of agape insists that, because true satisfaction and real rest can only be found in the highest and most lasting good, all seeking short of the pursuit of God brings only restlessness. This is what Augustine meant in his famous saying in Book One of Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.
Agape differs radically from the other methods of searching. We can search for an earthly love and, as we see in Wild at Heart, that can be an important part of many men’s lives. But Agape is bigger and God driven. We need Him to bridge the gap between us and Him. Guinness points out that:
If we are to desire the highest good, the highest good must come down and draw us so that it may become a reality we desire. All is grace. The secret of seeking is not in our human ascent to God, but in God’s decent to use. We start out searching, but we end up being discovered. We think we are looking for something; we realize we are found by Someone. As in Francis Thompson’s famous picture, “the hound of heaven” has tracked us down.
Listen to C.S. Lewis’ description of what happened to him in the summer of 1929 when he moved from being an atheist to a believer.
As the dry bones shook and came together in the dreadful Valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its graveclothes, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from the God of popular religion. My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am.”
People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.” To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.
We so often underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit in calling. I doubt the Apostle Paul doubted His power. Jesus knocked him down, blinded him, and rebuked him. I wonder what Paul thinks of the words of the hymn, “softly and tenderly Jesus is calling?"
Guinness says, “The notion of calling, or vocation, is vital to each of us because it touches on the modern search for a basis for individual identity and an understanding of humanness itself.”
I’ll try to summarize more of Guinness comments on calling while we are studying “Wild at Heart.”
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